How Kiwi.com helps airports and tourism boards to boost passenger traffic and bring travelers to their destinations

Interview with Wouter Veenstra, Product Manager for Data Insights and Analytics at Kiwi.com

How would you define route development, and why does it matter for airports and tourism boards?

Route development is about connectivity. It’s about connecting people from the rest of the world to the airport or the destination and the other way around – connecting people who live around the airport or destination to the rest of the world.

Since travel has become more affordable to everyone, people now have easy access to regional and worldwide travel, making route development more critical. Travelers don’t just go to the big capitals with the largest airports. They go to regional airports closer to their homes, and the price can often be cheaper than from more significant hubs.

There are many different routes, some of which bring tourists for the tourist season to the final destination. Some routes connect with big airport hubs used as transfer hubs, connecting one airport with another into a seamless trip. But not all of these routes are served or connected. That’s why route development is an integral part of business, both for airports and tourism boards, connecting people and places and, as a result, boosting passenger traffic and bringing more travelers to their destinations, increasing economic welfare in the region.

How is Kiwi.com involved in route development, and what can we offer to support airports and tourism boards?

At Kiwi.com, we are all about connectivity – we bring passengers from A to B, offer itineraries powered by our state-of-the-art technology including virtually interlined itineraries, or visualize the demand of people connecting cities. That is what we do – sometimes we connect a huge city with a small town and a large airport with a regional airport, and sometimes we just connect two regional airports.

The problem of the past has been that it was impossible, especially for smaller airports, to understand the demand of travelers who wanted to reach their destination but didn’t have an opportunity to do so. It was challenging for these smaller airports to quantify demand and approach the airline with the request to open up a new route, as they had no proof to share. And that’s what we at Kiwi.com are ready to help with – we have the travel data and can share this with anyone who needs to understand the demand of their airport or destination.

We use Kiwi.com data to achieve that. We collect data and slice it, turning raw material into actionable insight, so that it’s digestible for our partners. After that, partners can explore the current state and prove the demand for the route. As a result, we want to help the airports and tourism boards leverage their negotiations with the airlines – the ones who, in the end, open new routes.

What kind of data can Kiwi.com offer, and where does it come from?

Our users perform 100 million search requests daily and worldwide on Kiwi.com, sharing valuable insights into their travel plans and dream destinations. We quantify this search demand – if somebody is searching for a flight, we capture that, and we get that not only from the Kiwi.com website but also from all the searches that come in from our meta partners.

This gives us a holistic view of what the market wants, and not just one type of traveler, for example, a budget-conscious backpacker, but also somebody who travels for different reasons. There can be travelers visiting their friends and relatives, couples going on a long-awaited vacation, youngsters visiting cities for a weekend, or managers traveling for business.

We understand that many travel companies out there want to benefit from travel data and implement it to develop their business. That’s why we believe that actionable data insights are crucial in today’s world, and everybody should get access to the data.

What data products do we offer in Kiwi.com to support airports and tourism boards with route development? 

We have three product lines to offer, as we call them.

The first product line – dashboard – is built for smaller organizations that do not have dedicated analytics departments at their disposal. Or someone who starts to use data in their decision-making. The dashboard catches all the search demand worldwide for the selected airport or destination. It gives our partners access to a nice visual dashboard that is interactive and where the data is updated daily.

Our second product line is centered around reports and is built for advanced users and organizations with analyst departments and infrastructure. The users of these products will most likely combine the Kiwi.com data with other data points that they use internally to make business decisions. The report is a very sophisticated data set that we send to the user daily containing demand data, fares offered on the connections, and direct and indirect connections.

The third product line – route recommendation – is the category that is based on machine learning, and we at Kiwi.com are the proudest of. The goal of this product is to save precious time for our partners, who would otherwise go through the data and analyze it themselves. The product is still very much under development, and we ill be thrilled to show our Beta version to the world very soon.

Did some of our partners already benefit from our route development products? 

Yes, we cooperate with both airports and tourism boards and support them with their route development needs. For airports, the goal is to generate traffic, increase connectivity, and improve passengers’ experience. Airports are willing to attract new airlines and enhance their network – For example, we helped Prague Airport to connect carriers that don’t cooperate and bring more transiting passengers.

Tourism boards also benefit from our route development product, connecting various countries with their destination via Kiwi.com itineraries or having leverage in front of airlines to open new direct routes based on the high but underserved demand. The primary benefit for the tourism board is visibility increase and traffic boost. Thanks to Kiwi.com’s unique technology and strong customer base, we can create successful marketing campaigns and push destination awareness through Kiwi.com Stories, emails, notifications, and social media channels. One of our latest partnerships was with the Milan tourism board, running a visibility campaign in North America which exceeded performance targets.